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About this series

For years, community advocates, service providers and others have quietly complained of a disconnect: This community is rich in charitable resources but continuously posts some of the worst statistics in the state. People complain of duplicitous efforts, of “siloed” organizations who fail to effectively collaborate, of top-heavy initiatives that fail to engage people at the grassroots level. This and future stories in the Enquirer’s Granting Wishes series aim to explain the apparent disconnect between this city’s wealth of charity and poor statistics and to find ideas for how to close the gap.

Theodore Butler, 7, works on a word search at New Level Sports Tuesday afternoon. / Nick Garrison/For the Enquirer

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The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has invested heavily in programs to promote racial healing in Battle Creek, but even those who support those efforts say that money can have a downside in a small community.

Competition for charitable support is fierce, and in a community working to overcome historical barriers of institutional racism, that competitive dynamic imposes still another barrier that communities of color can little afford.

Some argue that disharmony among community leaders, and their willingness to compromise on vision, can slow the pace of change.

“Some leaders will tap dance for a dollar,” said Chris McCoy, executive director of New Level Sports. “I believe foundations have the ability to accelerate organizations.

“We don’t have a lot of time right now in the urban community, especially in the Battle Creek community,” he said. “It’s a point of no return.”

J.R. Reynolds, coordinator of Good Food BC and a freelance journalist who writes a column the Enquirer, said institutional racism, alive even in organizations committed to equality, “fosters mistrust, and that feeds into the competitive nature of resources.”

“There can be a significant level of mistrust on the part of black leaders,” Reynolds said. “Barriers are up that well-meaning holders of power unwittingly prop up and support.

“They are unaware of the barriers that exist that keep black leaders from being the most effective that they can be.”

The nation’s seventh-largest philanthropic foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, has made it a priority to dismantle those barriers. In 2010, the foundation announced the $75 million the “America Healing Initiative.”

Institutional racism is defined as the systematic distribution of resources, power and opportunity that result in racial and ethnic disparities: Here and nationally, for example, African-Americans have much higher poverty rates than whites, suffer disparities in health and are far less likely to have completed high school or college.

The foundation has been generous with investments in its hometown, funding several initiatives, including the recently announced Kellogg Community College Center for Diversity and Innovation, funded by a three-year, $2.1 million Kellogg Foundation grant.

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Yet decades of grant-making from Kellogg and the city’s many other charities has not translated into systemic change for people of color. That kind of change, some argue, will require stronger leadership within the community.

“The number of black leaders in the nonprofit arena is small; it’s very small,” said Kyra Wallace, president and chief executive officer of the Urban League of Battle Creek. “I feel as though I can count them all on one hand.”

For its part, the Kellogg Foundation has made it a priority to change that, as well. Foundation program officer Reggie LaGrand said the Kellogg Foundation weighs the diversity of a grantee’s organization when making grant decisions.

“From an external standpoint we do ask questions around what is the make-up of the board,” he said. “We want to know that and we want to know what is the make-up of the staff.”

Not all local funders consider race in their decisions, and for those and other reasons, leaders such as McCoy say they sometimes feel unheard by decision-makers.

“I’ve been at some meetings and they’re talking as if we’re not doing anything that we’re talking about,” McCoy said.. “They talk over it as if we’re not doing that.”

The disconnect

Reynolds said there can be a lack of understanding between funders and nonprofits can be difficult to bridge, particularly in communities of color.

“That mechanism I think is in many cases broken because what the funders look for in terms of outcomes may not necessarily be translatable in ways that the nonprofits are able to satisfy the funders,” Reynolds said.

Joy Bailey, director of organizing and training at Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing and Training in Kalamazoo, said the lack of understanding comes from historic policies and procedures introduced and determined by white people who at the time were in leadership roles of foundations and organizations.

Bailey, said the barriers are not purposely arranged to hold organizations back from achieving their goals, but the policies often come off as paternalistic .

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“The community will go to these people of color organizations and say, ‘What can we do to help,’ but will have all kinds of strings attached,” Bailey said. “All of those things that get defined by, many times, white academics or researchers who say this is the work and this is the right way to do it versus people of color and that whole area are often overlooked, ignored or discredited.”

Reynolds said those issues then become barriers between nonprofits and the foundations.

“Either they (foundations) don’t give enough to help that nonprofit achieve its goals or they give them a large amount of money, but there are so many restraints or conditions associated with those resources that the entity that is receiving the resources find it exceptionally challenging to leverage those funds to maximum,” Reynolds said.

McCoy said he has not taken money from a foundation that wanted them to make changes to their organization.

“We won’t take money if that’s the case,” he said.

McCoy said that’s what separates New Level from other urban nonprofits.

“You’ve got people who have not a clue on what the issues are because they’re reading it from a book, they’re not on the front line or in the trenches doing the work,” McCoy said. “So we never took money if we were going to be controlled.”

Staying independent

As the new leader of the decades-old organization, Wallace said her strategy is to seek monetary aid from multiple sources.

Some of the Urban League’s funding is from the Kellogg Foundation, but Wallace said she will not rely on the foundation as her sole provider — and the foundation doesn’t want her to. Wallace said making sure her organization has a diverse group of funders is a priority, which is why she seeks local and national support.

McCoy said he, too, seeks diversity in his funding, although without the support of his church, Assembly Christian Fellowship Church in Battle Creek, McCoy said New Level Sports would not survive.

McCoy has applied for and received grants from local foundations, but said he doesn’t want to run to a foundation every time he needs something. His monetary requests from the Kellogg Foundation have always been accepted, though he has been denied monetary support from other foundations in Battle Creek.

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The executive director said he knows to only ask for so much. Over the past 11 years New Level Sports has not received more than $150,000 per grant period from the Kellogg Foundation.

“If we had some of the funding that other organizations are granting, we could do a lot to solve the issues within our youth community,” McCoy said. “However, we seek to be self-sufficient and I think what happens is that a lot of nonprofit organizations don’t know what the procedure of granting is. Some things the Kellogg Foundation can do and some things they can’t do.”

New Level Sports has reached a size where the organization needs to employ full-time workers, but McCoy said it will take time to find the funding streams to pay employees.

Time is something McCoy said funders don’t always understand is a bigger issue for nonprofits who support the urban community.

“We have a very intense work,” McCoy said. “I think there is a big difference in nonprofits. The group or customer that we serve, inner-city families or inner-city youth, that’s not an easy task.”

Jennifer Bonner, project director of 21st Century Community Learning Center, said she understands needing time. Although her leadership is respected in the community, she said it took a while to get there.

“I think it took a while for the school district at the beginning to see,” Bonner said. “I think when it first started they thought the after school program was a babysitting entity.”

21st Century is a not-for-profit organization, but Bonner said the organization has received funding from almost all of the foundations in the community. She said her respect grew once she proved the importance of her organization’s work.

“It’s quality programming, I pride myself on having quality programs,” Bonner said. “I just think not everybody has that passion. We can have money all day but you have to have more than money, you have to be able to lead and support.”

And lack of leadership, say Wallace, McCoy and Bonner, is where the African-American community suffers most.

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“I feel that our leadership has been divided because of greed and selfishness,” said McCoy. “I think in our urban community this is the weakest that I’ve ever seen our leadership.”

Reynolds said he, too, sees selfishness among nonprofits in a fight for survival that takes a toll on leadership in the community.

“It’s a sort of self-centeredness on the part of individuals and agencies that are all participating in this whole community process,” Reynolds said. “Everyone tends to think of themselves first or think of their agencies first as opposed to thinking of the community collectively.”

If anything is going to change, Wallace said leaders in the African-American community have to start working together.

“Black leaders need to begin to authentically and genuinely work together for that common purpose and make sure that the focus is on the youth that we are serving as opposed to the individual organizations,” Wallace said. “That’s where the accountability, trust, transparency need to be had in the structure of leadership.”